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This collection of essays reconsiders aspects of Irish studies through the medium of literary and cultural theory. The author looks at the negotiations between texts and their contexts and then analyses how the writer both reflects and transforms aspects of his or her cultural milieu. The essays examine literary texts by W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce and Sean Ó'Faoláin; media texts such as Father Ted, American Beauty and a series of Guinness advertisements; as well as cultural and political contexts such as globalisation, religion, the Provisional IRA and media treatment of murders in Ireland. The author also looks at aspects of the postcolonial and feminist paradigms and makes use of a theoretical matrix based on the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.
List of contents
Contents: Negotiating Texts and Contexts - Ireland in Theory: The Influence of French Theory on Irish Cultural and Societal Development - The Ethics of Translation: Seamus Heaney's Cure at Troy and Beowulf - The Body Politic: The Ethics of Responsibility and the Responsibility of Ethics in Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes - 'You can never know women': Framing Female Identity in Dubliners - The Return and Redefinition of the Repressed: Postcolonial Studies and 'Eveline' in Dubliners - 'Inner Émigré(s)': Derrida, Heaney, Yeats and the Hauntological Redefinition of Irishness - 'Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse': Catholicism, Deconstruction and Postmodernity in Contemporary Irish Culture - 'Guests (Geists) of the Nation': A Heimlich (Unheimlich) Manoeuvre - Global Warnings: Towards a Deconstruction of the Global and the Local - 'Tá Siad ag Teacht': Guinness as a Signifier of Irish Cultural Transformation.
